>>950
Finder's thumbnail view has many limitations. You are limited in how large you can make the thumbnails and how tightly you can set the grid spacing, and there is no slider control to change these settings on the fly. There is also no way to link image navigation between the Finder window and the image viewer app (in this case, Xee) with the result being that you can never really switch back and forth between a large image view and the thumbnail view without losing your place in the thumbnail view (unless you always do your navigation in the finder and close Xee after viewing each individual image). And there is no convenient keyboard toggle between thumbnail and single image viewing (ie, tapping the Enter key in thumbnail mode to open the image.)

I agree that Xee's primary benefits include speed and low memory/resource consumption, and I would certainly not want to turn it into a bloated application. But I really wish there was a better way to browse and analyze images while easily toggling between single image and thumbnail modes.

In essence, I'm not so much trying to duplicate Finder functionality as I am trying to wean myself from my reliance on iPhoto - which is useless in many situations due to its requirement that you import images before viewing/working with them.